"It is intimate and it is universal. It lives in our heart. It lives in the sky. It rises from the depths of the substance and offers itself with the warmth of love. Or it can go back down into the substance and hide there, latent and pent-up, like hate and vengeance."
Gaston Bachelard, The psychoanalysis of Fire

Sankta Barbara's theme of fire delves into complex associations with: justice, change, transformation, evil/good, death/life, hearth, home, sexuality, male/female duality, purification, reverie and dreams. It references the naturally occurring phenomena of thunder and lightening and uses sound and symbols to reveal layers of conflation and common ideas exploring the nature and the roots of spirituality.

Sankta Barbara, a collaborative video project created by composer Paulo C. Chagas and media/performance artist Camille Turner was first conceived as a performance at a residency at Interaktions-Labor, a media lab in an abandoned coal mine in Göttelborn, Germany in 2003.

Inspired by the site of the Göttelborn coal mine, Camille was struck by its resonances with the steel industry in which her father, a boilermaker, made his living. The men who worked in the coal mine descended into the bowels of the earth while her father balanced on beams high in the air. Camille wrote a meditative text responding to the invisible and dangerous work that these men perform and its manifestations in family and social life. Narrated in German and English, the text forms the backdrop of the piece. Paolo mixed echoes of voices of German coal-miners, sounds from the mine and a miner's choir to reanimate footage of the now disused space.

In stark contrast to the raw masculinity of the mine, the artists discovered a central female character, Sankta Barbara. As the patron saint of mining, her image is ever present in the mine, throughout the town and in the hearts of the miners who depended on her for protection.

A small wooden carving of Sankta Barbara was located inside a nearby mine shaft where miners looked to her daily for luck. When the mine went out of business and became flooded, the precious statue was rescued by firefighters. She now graces the Heimat Museum in the town of Quierschied.

In her performance, Camille assumes the persona of Sankta Barbara. Her ghost-like image materializes in various places in and around the mine including the "Verlesesaal" (the reading room where miners received their daily task sheets). We first see her here emerging from a life-sized mosaic of the saint which graces the wall. During the performance, Sankta Barbara shifts into Changó, the god of thunder and lightening from of Afro-American origin. African slaves in the Americas were forbidden to workship their gods so they syncretized them with European saints to ingeniously hide their religion from those who enslaved them.


the artists

Paulo C. Chagas was born in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil in 1953. He is a composer, theoretician and researcher in music technology. He has a PhD in Musicology (University of Liège), has worked as Sound Director of the Studio for Electronic Music of the WDR Radio, Cologne. He conducts research into electronic and computer music, algorithmic composition, interactivity and intermedia. Since July 2004 has worked as a professor of composition and music technology at the University of California, Riverside

Camille Turner is a Jamaican-born Toronto-based multi-disciplinary artist. Her installations, performances, media works and community engagements experiment with ways to map cultural experience. She has presented work in Canada, USA, UK, Senegal, Australia, Germany, Jamaica and Mexico. Using performance as a means of social research, she utilizes the black body as a ‘site’ of colonial encounter and resistance. Her ongoing projects include: Miss Canadiana, a beauty queen on a Red, White and Beautiful Tour, who challenges assumptions of Canadian identity and normative beauty and the Final Frontier, an Afrofuturist performance utilizing science-fiction’s racialized iconography of "otherness"to probe the disjuncture between unspoken histories and fears beneath the smooth, polite skin of Canadian multiculturalism.